Emily St. James is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Vox, The A.V. Club, and the New York Times. She is the co-creator of the podcast Arden and a writer on the TV series Yellowjackets.
When I was in the fifth grade, I started having to use the locker room with guys several times my size, and I hated it. I hated it when I was scrawny and small, so much tinier than them. And I hated it when I abruptly hit puberty and shot
A couple of weeks ago, I joked to a friend that my career was going to be 90 percent explaining to people what the term "multi-camera sitcom" means, 10 percent other things. It was kind of a low point, in that I felt like I was stuck having
A couple of days ago, I was talking about Manchester by the Sea with someone, trying to convince them to see it (for whatever reason, I run into a ton of people who just find the idea of this movie very unappealing, and I wonder if I am alone in
One of the things a lot of younger writers find hard to do that I have always found easier than most is writing "kickers," those pithy little sentences that come at the very end of reviews or thinkpieces or whatever and are supposed to leave you with one
(I love stock photography!) Let's talk about something tough, something I've been trying to write about for a year and a half now and mostly failing, because I keep pulling the rug out from under myself: the growing prominence of sociopolitical commentary in cultural reviews (or,
(As we head toward Election Day, I thought I'd share a few anecdotes from my political past. They won't take over the newsletter, but I have enough of them of interest to keep your attention, hopefully.) In the summer of 2008, unemployed, desperate, and believing I
If you have followed my career lo these many years, you will know that I have a major soft spot for graphic adventure games – games where you take over a little character who tries to solve puzzles (usually by combining random items in an attempt to guess exactly what the
If you spend a lot of time reading and researching about '80s and '90s TV (and u know I do), a group keeps popping up: the Viewers for Quality Television. At first, the idea of the group seems more or less obvious: this was an organization of TV
Hello, internet: On behalf of myself, Emily VanDerWerff, but speaking for every single person I know who writes things on the internet, let me ask you a simple question: Are you mad at the headline? That thing you're upset about, the thing you're going to yell
When I got to Vox, one of the first questions I had for my new bosses was: Did they want ratings on our reviews? The answer was yes (much as I had secretly hoped it would be no). And it's easy to see why. For more casual consumers
I spent my vacation in Canada, specifically the Banff National Park region (10/10, very good park, would park again), and on my first day there, I went a little crazy on Twitter, as Americans inevitably do, mocking Canada's weird potato chip variants. I got some blowback for
Let me show you something dumb I wrote. Okay, first, let me set the scene. It's February 2013. I've just finished watching "One Man's Trash" -- the best episode of Girls still, to this day -- on HBO's crummy little